Jon is joined again this week by Dan Gent. They talk about the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union and what effects Brexit might have on their design agencies. Covering their fears about the uncertainty the future might hold, possible impact on new business and hiring, as well as what they are both going to be doing to try and weather the storm. Trying not to focus too much on the negatives, they speak about how to make the best of Brexit and how small agencies might be able to turn this unfortunate series of events to their advantage.

This week Jon welcomes designer founder Murat Mutlu from Marvel App to discuss what it's like for a designer to leave the agency life behind and found a product company.

It was great to hear about the journey, challenges and what the future has in store for this world class design tool. Marvel allows designers to turn their ideas into interactive prototypes that can be used to present and test.

Jon is joined by Tom from Lighthouse London to talk about the filter process they both go through when deciding to take on or pitch for a specific piece of work or project.

The list of criteria discussed is not meant to be a prescriptive list we believe every agency should abide by, it’s just a discussion of the criteria that we run through when making those decisions and hopefully there are points that encourage or inspire others.

This week Jon is joined by his co-founder Neil Gardiner to discuss their experiences with mentorship. Every Interaction have been receiving business mentorship for 18 months now, so it seemed like a good time to reflect and go over some of the benefits having mentorship has brought to their business. They cover how they got started with mentorship, some of the exercise and topics covered as well as discuss alternatives.

In this episode Dan’s co-founder, Tom Johnson joins Jon to talk about how their designers and developers work together in their teams to deliver their client work. As the design focussed half of his company, it was interesting to speak to Tom and discuss the differences between Lighthouse and Every Interaction in term of focus, team make-up and collaboration of team members when delivering projects.

How you manage feedback from clients can make or break a project. It’s a tricky thing to handle and there are many ways you can go about dealing with it. This week Dan & Jon share their process and different ways of managing client feedback. They cover how to get the most out of presentations and being prepared to receive constructive feedback that benefits the project, you, the client and your relationship.

This week Dan and Jon talk time tracking and how they use this data to help run and grow their digital agencies.

Completing your timesheets is perhaps the most tedious part of your day, however the value this data can give your business is immense. Understanding how much time projects actually take helps you better quote for future work you are asked to cost up. Find out how to get the most from analysing your time and run your company more efficiently as you scale.

Working for the worst client imaginable - yourself. Dan reveals the process and learnings from recently replacing the agency website for Lighthouse, and Jon talks about the what lies ahead for Every Interaction and the upcoming site replacement project they are planning.

Dan and Jon talk about the process they go through when hiring a new employee and what they look for in potential candidates. They go into detail about the places they advertise, the applications that come in, the filtering that takes place and how the process is moved forwards into interviews. They also cover what they look for in potential candidates, short intensive courses, as well as gender equality.

Does having a specialism put you in a better position as a new/smaller agency? Dan and Jon fumble around what they think are their respective agency specialisms (defining exactly what you do is so hard!) and how taking that approach benefits them in what they do for their clients. We talk about how we both started out and how things changed as we matured. Both having come from full-service agency backgrounds, we discuss how that’s not where we see the future of our companies and how focus can help make your agency more successful.

This week Jon is joined by Dan to talk about how we manage your time and feel productive while running our agencies. It’s a hard thing to quantify and we feel every business and person running them are different. But we talk about what works for us, along with what doesn’t.

This week Jon is joined by Dan to talk about how to sell the value of the design process to clients. If you’re working with clients who don’t understand the value of design or simply don’t have any experience working with a design team, how do you communicate the value your design process can bring? The benefit of doing this well can mean:

Jon is joined today by Anna McLoughlin of Inkspiller. Inkspiller are a copy and brand strategy consultancy helping businesses find their inner voice and communicate to the world. Anna works mostly with creative companies - helping agencies to find their voice and communicate what makes them different. Anna recently took Every Interaction through this process and the result was a new content strategy that led a revamp of their website.

This week Jon is joined by Matthew Lenzi of Hanno - a globally distributed product design agency. Hanno are quite unique in the way that they run their business; a distributed team working around the world using a forward-thinking vision of 'how companies should work in the future'. They’re living the dream sold to us by the level of communication offered by the internet - something that’s quite unique and I’ve not seen anyone else do as successfully before. We talk about how they got started and made this model a success.

This week Jon and Dan are joined by Andy Budd from Clearleft - a well known UX Design agency based in Brighton. Clearleft are well known for their high quality of work as well as advancing the field by putting on a number of UX, Design and Development events around the country.

This week Jon is joined by Pete Campbell from Kaizen Search - an SEO and digital marketing agency based in London. Pete started his agency less than 3 years ago by himself, and has since successfully scaled to 9 people.

This week Jon is joined by Brad Flowers from BullHorn Creative - a brand & communication strategy agency in Kentucky USA. Brad and his fellow directors have been making changes to how they run their business, inspired by meeting folks at peer groups and studying business books. This inspiration has helped provide them with a more solid foundation for growth and stability. In this episode Jon and Brad go over this experience, and share how anyone else can do the same.

This week Jon is joined by Dylan Baskind - designer/developer and founder of proposal writing tool Qwilr. We speak about Dylan's journey from working in the agency world, having direct clients and hitting frustrations with creating proposals in the ‘print’ mentality of an A4 PDF doc that takes way too much time to create and delivers an inferior experience for both creator and client. We talk about how Qwilr came to be and what goes into making a great proposal.